IoT utility pedestals — from prototype to patented product line

Context

Utility delivery across the estate ran on unmetered or manually-read equipment. Consumption was estimated, recovery was inconsistent, and the group utilities net balance sat deeply negative — the organisation was consistently paying for more than it recovered, without the data to explain why.

Challenge

Two problems that most organisations treat as one:

1. New sites needed a connected utility product that did not exist on the market in the form required.
2. Existing sites had thousands of mechanically sound units with no data interface. Replacing them wholesale was capital-prohibitive and would have taken years to complete.

Solving only the first would have left the majority of the estate dark. Solving only the second would have locked new sites into ageing technology.

Approach

Built the new product end to end. I owned the product from ideation and prototyping through supplier selection, production and installation management — defining the metering and connectivity requirements, the operational data model, and the commercial logic the hardware had to support. The resulting design was patented.

Ran retrofit as a parallel programme, not a phase two. Rather than queueing the existing estate behind the new product, I specified a retrofit module that gave legacy units the same data interface. This converted a multi-year capital replacement into an operational rollout that could begin immediately.

Designed for the installer, not the spec sheet. Installation procedure was treated as a product surface: minutes per unit, tolerance for field conditions, and unambiguous steps were explicit requirements. At thousands of units, install time is the dominant cost.

Unified the data model across old and new. Retrofitted and native units report identically, so operations and finance never had to reason about two classes of asset.

Outcome

• 400+ patented smart pedestals designed, produced and deployed across the network.
• 2,500+ legacy units retrofitted, bringing the existing estate onto the same data platform.
• €1.5M in new revenue unlocked in the first year of the retrofit programme.
• Group utilities net balance improved from −30% to +37% — achieved through accurate measurement and recovery, not price changes.
• Consumption data became available for operational planning and for automated alerting.

What I would carry into another engagement

The revenue did not come from the hardware; it came from finally measuring what had previously been estimated. Any asset-heavy operation running on estimates is carrying a similar gap, and the size of that gap is the business case — it just cannot be seen until the instrumentation exists.